Quarter 9 - Week 2

The pace hasn't really picked up yet, there's this 'friction' that tells you that hey, there's one more week that you can relax for now. That doesn't stop the quiz or case study from happening though. And so, you attend both half-prepared, knowing fully well that you're going to get whacked out of your senses. The profs are slowly beginning to show a slight impatience, since they're raring to go, and they're not going to let a class of 70 slow them down. So, on we go, to weeknights of readings and weekends of learning.

Consumer Behaviour

This week continued to deal with perceptions and elements related to branding and loyalty. We essentially spoke of how products need to be slowly embedded in the consumers mind - through both behavioural and cognitive learning. The first is more related to the emotional aspect, how you motivate and reinforce the perception in the consumer's mind, that he SHOULD use this product. In fact, if you stop reminding the user every now and then of the product, it actually gets removed from his mind and then it becomes extremely difficult to place it back in there. Another way of learning is by drawing a parallel between that brand and some experience/relationship you've had in your life, maybe a father/daughter thing like in Titan or the mother/son thing in Bournvita, or the boy/girl thing in Fastrack. So you liken it to something and remember the brand everytime one of the associations is drawn up. A few more examples came up of different modes of learning.

Strategic Leadership

This week, we spoke of two cases, Park Hotels and Bharat Forges. Interestingly, the prof seems to have picked up cases where the person started off in the role at the age of 23 give or take a couple of years. These aren't cases of people who got leadership roles by 30/35. The soft matter aside, we were trying to focus on why and how people make decisions that take their companies forward. In Park Hotels, we were grappling with the fact of whether the right clientele was being targeted, whether they should pursue restaurants as a primary business instead of hotels, about whether expanding to the next few locations was the right thing to do etc. Towards the end, we start drawing connections to what the management thinks of the Parks hotel, and where is it that they really think they want to go to. Honestly, I was like eh?

Bharat Forges was a much more interesting case. It looked like these guys were being highly proactive, in choosing customers and expansions, and moving forward all the time. Of course, it took the guys 15 years before he really starting breaking out of the cocoon in terms of humongous decisions, but hey, he took it all the same. And the entire class was constantly looking at how did this guy really get to where he was going. Was it based on luck? Was it based on the fact that competitors weren't moving? And as the prof tries to make us arrive at the reason of all the decisions that were taken, we grab at straws here and there, trying to figure out if the decisions were right for the time, and was there anything else that he could have done. Again, I better try to analyse some of the case, or it's going to be more 'Eh?' moments.

Personal Interpersonal Effectiveness Workshop

Today's class dealt more with choosing if we're doing what we really want to do in life, and what is it that we want to be remembered for. The class started with a discussion around the mission and vision, and an assignment the prof had set for us - What would we do if we knew we were going to die in 1 year, 5 years and 40 years. By the end of the discussion, the basic question was are your priorities aligned, and do you know what your priorities are in the first place. We then moved on to meditation and we spoke of what it was expected to bring to a person. Today's discussion was a little less meatier than what I remembered from the time before. Let's hope that I get more out of the next session, or that the discussions go deeper towards where we should dig further.

Back to the daily grind, two weeks are up!